Thursday, August 20, 2015

Since moving the rooms around, the living room has looked a little barren, especially the big blank wall behind the tv.

I wanted to cover a most of the wall, and I would have liked a gallery grid wall, but I don't want to put a ton of holes in the walls of our rental, and I don't have lots of identical large frames with white mats. I did, however, have a 48x60 canvas and a bunch of paint in the garage. I bought another 48x60 canvas on sale at Michaels with a coupon for $43, plus a package of paint rollers for $8. Voila, limited only by my own creativity.

I wanted something white and bright, to distract from the hideous beige walls. I thought about trying my hand at an abstract painting, but they are a lot harder than they look.

Instead I collected as many blue paints as I could find in the garage, a couple of reds, pinks and greens, and made my bazillionth splatter painting.

I made the paintings as a diptych. (Not a true diptych, they aren't hinged together, but they are two separate pieces connected as one image.) I painted a base coat of white, then laid the canvases together touching side by side, and started painting.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Last week Amazon had the first seven books of the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon on sale for $1.99 for the kindle. I downloaded them all to my kindle and I have done nothing but read for the past week. Actually, my kindle is broken, and I have been reading the books on the kindle app on my phone. I have read approximately three thousand pages on my phone.

I haven't been able to put it down. I've read the first five books this week, to the detriment of just about everything else, like cooking dinner or sleeping or writing blog posts. One thing I really like about the series is that the protagonists are a bit older than the usual. I'm tired of reading romance novels about 19 year old girls finding love with 35 year old men. Older women can be sexy and lovable too, you know. (Ahem.) In Outlander, time-traveling heroine Claire travels back to the 1740s at age 28, and her beau Jamie is 23. The first two books are about them in their twenties, and then the remaining six books they are in their fifties. And Claire has a career in the 1700s, no less. (Claire also has lots of nookie in the 1700s, but not the smutty sort. You will not mistake it for a Harlequin Blaze book.)

Small nitpicks: I wouldn't describe these books as tightly plotted. They are more a series of misadventures that eventually wrap up at the end. Sort of. Also, I'm not overly fond of reading about rape, and there are two rapes so far. Not gratuitous violence, both are integral to the plot and move the story forward and provide motive for all the actions that come after....but eh, I don't like reading about rape. There is actually quite a bit of violence in the books, come to think of it, since they are set during two different wars.

Other small nitpick not related to Diana Gabaldon's writing: the entire series was downloaded into my kindle app as one large book, and my phone app doesn't have a "go to end of chapter/book" function (or maybe it does and I don't know how to use it), but it is hard to tell if I should just keep reading because there's only a few more pages in the chapter/book, or if I should make myself just stop because there is still another five hundred pages to go. I was also slightly daunted by the the size of the kindle document, as I finished the first book after six hours and it told me I was only 5% of the way through the document.

In any event, I've finished book five, and I can't allow myself to pick up book six until I do all the stuff on my to-do list that I've been ignoring.

The garage freezer broke for the third time, and the beeping kitchen fridge/freezer, being in constant use, would no longer shut up, no matter how much tape we put on it. Ergo, new fridge. So far, no beeping.

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I've got this slanted window that I don't know what to do with.

The window faces west and is alight like a blazing hell in the afternoon. It makes that side of the house rather warm. I'd like to cover it, but haven't figured out how. The slant and how close it is to the ceiling line are making it difficult to find an inexpensive, temporary solution. I'm not putting custom plantation shutters in a rental.

My first attempt was sheer curtains hung with a tension rod, and I would just use clothes pins to hold the curtains on the rod. But the slant means that the rod doesn't lay flat and thus does not have enough tension to stay up.